WATCHING by the pseudonymous artist Ripcache examines surveillance in the age of AI, where the once-faceless machine now appears personable yet remains opaque. Drawing on telemetry—data gathered from remote systems—Ripcache transforms monitoring signals into pixelated black-and-white images that depict reciprocal observation: humans watching the many-eyed entity that also watches them. Referencing the evolution of surveillance from CCTV to AI’s shapeless “Shoggoth” figure, the work reflects on how self-monitoring AI drifts into distorted outputs and “catastrophic forgetting.” Ripcache visualizes this recursive feedback, revealing the glitches, overload, and obscured meaning produced by systems that continually observe—and revise—themselves.
